Take Me Out

Bill Littlefield plays games even as he writes about them, or talks about them on his nationally syndicated NPR radio program, Only a Game. He unabashedly versifies not for profit, or a championship cup, but for fun. He makes no bones about it: these verses are doggerel. From mumblety-peg to the Olympics, from the bedrooms of aspiring nine-year-olds to the boardrooms of sports executives, his imagination and playfulness illuminate the rings, rinks, fields, and frustrations of sports and games.

What Racers Do

Racers race. That's what they do,
And they are fast, and noisy, too.
(Of quiet they are quite bereft,
Driving fast and turning left.)

Through headphones, as they speed along,
They hear instructions like a song
Screeching in the treble clef:
"Keep driving fast and turning left!"

Precisely where it had begun,
The race will end. It will be won,
For someone opposite of last
Kept turning left and driving fast.

"What is it about rhyme? Whatever it is, we fall in love with it (if ever) early in life: as soon as we learn to talk, or probably sooner. The same can be said about love for sports. By bringing together these two forms of attachment, the clever Littlefield reminds us that poetry and sports, at a level deeper than their different kinds of grandiosity, both have roots in childhood pleasures."—Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky

While we confidently expect children to delight in them, we offer them for adults. Take Me Out takes us out to the ball game, to the chess match, to the squash court, in rain and shine.

BILL LITTLEFIELD is the host of NPR and WBUR's sports show, Only a Game,which is syndicated to some 200 public radio stations around the country. The author of several books on sports, two novels and two collections of his radio and magazine commentaries, he is writer-in-residence at Currey College, where he teaches one course each semester. A graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Littlefield began broadcasting sports commentary on WBUR (Boston) in 1984.

STEPHEN COREN is a graphic designer, artist, web developer and video producer who lives in the Boston area.